White screen. Music
starts [Everloving by Moby] and
plays for 10-20 seconds without video. At appropriate time the scene slowly
fades in, replacing the white.
(Mid Afternoon) With all the pomp and circumstance that is medical school graduation, the distorted voice of the dean can be heard, through the reverberating loud speakers above the crowd of nervous and excited family and friends. As the camera pans across the crowd, the campus police (4 of them) are marching down a hall toward the graduation and then move meticulously through the audience looking for Richard. The scene switches between the crowd and the campus police as the dean is heard speaking intermittently.
Dean Whitlow
speaking slowly and clearly
Welcome parents, friends, and assorted admirers. We are here because the 196 men and women before you have with their limitless dedication and effort over the past four years earned the right to call themselves ...... physicians. They came here with the dream to serve those in need, to heal the sick, to wrestle health from the hands of death and disease. With their sites set on the oath of Hippocrates...
Richard Cartwright
You can take any given situation and trace the path you took to get there. I mean, there are things that happen, but then there are the reasons that things happen.
Cut to earlier in
the day: Richard and Taylor sitting proudly during the preliminary graduation
activities.
Richard
Look at me. I was 23 minutes and 51 seconds from graduating from medical school, the crown jewel of graduate education.
Cut to Richard being
dragged down a long hall by several policemen, with Richard still narrating.
You can tell by the way the cops mouths are moving, they are yelling at him.
Richard
23 minutes and 51 seconds away from giving my parents reason to go to dinner parties, long after they’ve ended up hating each other.
Scene changes to a
dinner party, with middle-aged people milling around a punch bowl obviously
chatting and laughing at an older man with the sweetest comb-over anyone has
ever seen.
Richard
You know what I mean. Everything they wanted for themselves but never achieved is played out again and again around the punch bowl with their so-called friends.
Cut to scene of Mr.
Cartwright in cubicle, pushing papers.
They get to work at nine and wait for the clock to hit five...
Cut to scene of Mr.
Cartwright on his knees, kissing a banker's ass.
They kiss ass and jump through the appropriate hoops,
Cut back to punch
bowl.
To create for themselves a piece of themselves who is a doctor...a physician. A piece of themselves who will serve those in need, heal the sick, wrestle health from the hands of death and disease but most of all save me from the thought that I'm an old man with a miserable job, a failing marriage, and a garden of unplanted dreams.
Cut to dark smoky
room with same middle aged people playing poker around a poker table. Music
changes to saxophone jazz.
Middle age becomes some sick competition between bored parents.
Close up of Ms. Beck putting down three of a kind.
Cut back to punch
bowl.
Ms. Beck
smiling contentedly
Jack is about to start his final year of business school.
The group of middle
agers hoo and haw in approval.
Cut back to poker
game, Mr. Johnson puts down four of a kind and a pair.
Mr. Johnson
Holly is about to graduate from law school. She's leaning toward contracts and grants, but we’re trying to encourage her to pursue corporate law.
Richard Cartwright
Law school. I question the motives of many of my medical school colleagues but law school is a different story altogether. I mean does anyone really want to practice law?
Cut to Ethan in the
middle of a law school interview / music dies down to a whisper.
Law school interviewer
Well, Ethan I see you took the MCAT and the LSAT.
Interviewer pauses
and looks at Ethan with suspicion, inwardly questioning the authenticity of the
applicant before him. Ethan does not seem the least bit uncomfortable with this
scrutiny.
Why do you want to go to law school?
Ethan
Well I'm about to graduate from college, and I need to make at least as much money as my dad, and I have no marketable skills, and, well, by process of elimination it's either law school or med school. And law school is only three years...
Cut back to poker
game, Mr. Cartwright puts down a straight flush.
Mr. Cartwright
Richard was recently accepted into medical school.
Cut back to punch
bowl. At this the crowd of middle aged parents, though they are insanely
jealous, can not hide their enthusiasm. They are very impressed.
Richard
without stressing the curse words
Anyway, the straight flush is your child in medical school. Parent of the fucking year.
Cut back to poker
scene. Richard enters and sits down as Mr. Cartwright slowly collects all the
money in the pot. The adults don't see him. Richard is narrating - not talking.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: if you could see through your parents' bullshit then why go? Well, we all have our reasons...